Introduction; Backup And Recovery Overview; Active Directory Backup - ACRONIS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 10 - ACTIVE DIRECTORY BACKUP AND RESTORE Manual

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1. Introduction

Microsoft Active Directory is a central component of the Windows platform, which can be found in

any size of Windows environment. Active Directory contains critical information, availability of which

is important for businesses to operate.

This white paper is created to enable system administrators to implement their own recovery

solution for Active Directory using Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 software.

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) services use a database located on the file system of a domain

controller. If more than one domain controller is available, the information stored in the database is

constantly replicated between multiple domain controllers.

A Windows component called Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is used to create a consistent copy

of the AD database.

Active Directory recovery scenarios may consist of recovery of a crashed domain controller, recovery

of a corrupted AD database, and restoring of accidentally deleted or modified AD records. Required

operations and tools may vary depending on the type of information that needs to be restored, and

availability of other domain controllers.

In Windows (including Windows 2003 and Windows 2008), the Active Directory database is typically

located in the %systemroot%\NTDS folder (such as C:\Windows\NTDS) of a domain controller. While

this location is used by default, it is configurable. The Ntdsutil command-line utility may help you to

find the current location. Note that the database and the transaction logs may be stored on different

volumes, so be sure both are included in the backup.

Because Active Directory service is almost always running, VSS should be used to ensure consistency

of the files after the backup. Without VSS, the files would be in a so-called crash-consistent state –

that is, after the restore, the system would be in the same state as if the power were disconnected at

the moment when backup began.

While such backup is good enough for most applications, databases (including the Active Directory

database) may not be able to start from a crash-consistent state, and would require manual recovery.

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Backup & recovery 10